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How Pebble kickstarted a trend

Eric Migicovsky's crowdfunded watch proved there is a hunger for wearable tech

F Scott Schafer

This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

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On 18 May, 2012, a project named "Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android" was backed for the 68,929th time on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The company, Pebble Technology, had set out to raise $100,000 (£60,000). After 37 days, it had raised $10,266,845 (£6,285,947), which is the highest amount ever secured on the platform. "We had been building this product for four years up to that point," says Eric Migicovsky, CEO of Pebble Technology. "I used to show Pebble to my friends, and their eyes lit up. I knew that we were able to get people's imaginations going, but the support we had was still amazing."

Pebble is a smartwatch with a black-and-white e-paper display that instantly notifies users about incoming emails, calls and text messages by vibrating. An open API has allowed developers to create a thousand apps for the device. Pebble Canvas, for instance, allows you create your own personalised watch face, adding data such as the weather, calendar or stock prices. "Pebble is about connecting an accessory on your body to your phone," Migicovsky says.

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The Pebble dates back to 2008 when Migicovsky was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and he had the idea of building a device that would notify him when he had received a new text message or email while he was cycling. "I came out with a prototype, essentially a circuit board wrapped in a little bit of metal that worked with BlackBerrys," he says. He sold a couple of hundred versions of the device, which he called the InPulse, for $150 (£90) each and moved to Mountain View, California in mid 2010. "I don't think I met maybe more than two hardware startups in my entire time in Waterloo, but then, being back down in the Valley, it's like around the corner everyone is building hardware,"

Migicovsky says. "Our success is highly linked to the fact that we were in a place where there were people who ran around talking about microcontrollers." Migicovsky went back to the drawing board to make a new product that would solve several of the problems the InPulse had. He wanted to design a smartwatch that worked with both iPhone and Android, was visible in direct sunlight, didn't need charging more than once a week and was waterproof. He named it Pebble.

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However, when Migicovsky took the idea to venture capitalists and investors, he was dismissed out of hand -- they either didn't like the hardware or didn't believe there was a market for the device. In March 2012, having run out of options, Migicovsky turned to Kickstarter. His target was to raise $100,000 (£60,000), which would allow him to make 1,000 Pebbles -- backers who pledged $115 (£70) would get a jet-black version. Within two hours, Pebble Technology met its goal. Within six days, it had broken Kickstarter's funding record.

Migicovsky hired seven friends and flew to China to find a manufacturer. At that time, he estimated that they would be able to ship the first watches by September. By Christmas 2012, however, Pebble backers received a holiday e-card instead of an e-ink smartwatch. "We had manufacturing problems. We had to learn how to glue things, just like kids playing with white glue,"

Migicovsky says. "It was a process of experimentation, trial and error. We had to make a type of plastic and then find out which glue we wanted to use, and then find out which oven we wanted to use within the parameters, how long it takes to spread the glue, how many milligrams or grams of glue we used, how long to put it in the oven, how long to keep it drying, what did the test fixture look like, what did the clamp look like. There were just so many variables." At the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January 2013, Migicovsky finally announced that Pebble would start shipping the watches on January 23.

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In September 2013, Samsung unveiled its £299 Galaxy Gear smartwatch at Berlin's IFA show and, on the same day, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs unveiled the Toq smartwatch at a conference in San Diego. There are currently about 18 smartwatches on the market -- and rumours of an Apple iWatch refuse to die -- but competition doesn't bother Migicovsky. "I think you see from the reviews of the Galaxy Gear that it's not really a competitor for the Pebble. It's not really a competitor for anything," he says. "The numbers speak for themselves. We're selling out at retail stores in the US and there are hundreds of thousands of Pebbles around the world."

When Migicovsky was a student, he was fascinated with the internal mechanics of old watches -- and that enchantment hints at why he sees the Pebble as an incremental, rather than a disruptive, innovation. In a recent interview with wired.com, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said that he wanted "the entire smartphone, the entire internet" on his wrist. But reinventing the smartphone is not part of Migicovsky's vision. "We think people want a device that complements the phone that they already carry in their pocket, rather than something that you need to change your life around," he says. "We're building a platform on your wrist, we're building the place where people are going to be developing apps that run on your body."

Crowdfunded/Crowd-designed: how Pebble was refined

Migicovsky started making prototypes for Pebble during autumn of 2011, after Apple announced iOS 5. "With our previous product [the inPulse], the number-one question people asked was, "Does it work with my iPhone?" says Migicovsksy. "It was only with iOS 5 that Apple finally added the ability for a background app to talk to hardware accessories." Many of Pebble's features were requests from Kickstarter backers, such as its water-resistance to 50 metres. It has a low-power 144x168 pixel black-and-white memory LCD display.

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Currently there are more than 1,000 apps for Pebble, including Pebble Canvas, which allows you to customise what information is displayed. "Our focus now is to incentivise developers to create apps," says Migicovsky. "We want to make sure we're building a platform, rather than just a piece of hardware."